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Robert Aaron Gordon

Robert Aaron Gordon

Robert Aaron Gordon

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Robert Aaron Gordon was an American economist. He was a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley from 1938 to 1976. In 1975, he served as president of the American Economic Association.

Popular Quotes

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"This pioneer work, written for both the professional economist and the businessman, has become a classic in its field. It is a detailed examination of the structure of the large business corporation in relation to its actual economic functioning. Because Gordon views the corporation not as an external institution but as organized human activity, his emphasis is on the personal and volitional elements in leadership, or how businessmen actually shape their practices. His analysis is based on a formidable mass of case material and statistical data"
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Robert Aaron Gordon
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"Robert Aaron Gordon [was] an economist and an international authority on business cycles and manpower policy... Dr. Gordon, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, had been consultant to the Presidents Council of Economic Advisers under Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson. In 1975, he served as the president of the American Economic Association. Dr. Gordon, who was a strong critic of the current computer techniques used on economics, helped to design todays unemployment statistics when he was the bead of a Presidential commission that bore his Warne in the early 1960s."
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Robert Aaron Gordon
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"Already before World War II he had turned his attention to what would become a life-long preoccupation; business cycle theory and policy, with special emphasis on man-power problems and unemployment. His books on The Dynamics of Economic Activity (1947) and Business Fluctuations (1952) were for many years standard reading at American universities, and it was an obvious choice when in the early sixties the American Economic Association asked him to co-edit (with Lawrence Klein) its second volume on Readings in Business Cycles (1965), his most outstanding contributions in this field. His last book in this field was Economic Growth and Instability (1974). His primary interest, however, was in the more narrow field of unemployment, which he saw as his countrys most serious."
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Robert Aaron Gordon
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"The more active working directors become, the more closely involved they resemble the executives now responsible for providing business leadership. A full-time working director is merely another official who is also a director. Wide adoption of the proposal for professional directors, particularly if management is able to select the directors itself, may merely make general the situation now found in some companies in which only the executive group is represented on the board."
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Robert Aaron Gordon
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"Corporation executives, particularly the more prominent ones, and wealthy individuals generally decry the fact that the "New Deal" has fostered a feeling of class-consciousness among workers and low-income groups. Class-consciousness, however, is not new in this country, and it is most pronounced among those groups who decry it while not recognizing the phenomenon themselves. Common social backgrounds, common business interests, and common fears, prejudices, and loyalties create among those who possess wealth and economic power a strong and clear-cut feeling of membership in an economic and social class."
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Robert Aaron Gordon
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"Speak... of the separation of ownership and active leadership. Ordinarily the problem is stated in terms of the divorce between ownership and "control". This last word is badly overused, and it needs to be precisely defined... Our procedure... will be to study the ownership of officers and directors and then to ascertain the extent to which non-management stockholdings are sufficiently concentrated to permit through ownership the wielding of considerable power and influence (control?) over management by an individual, group or another corporation."
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Robert Aaron Gordon

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